It's been brought to my attention that certain ogranizations, most notably a few universities, have been either blocking BitTorrent clients, or throttling their upload rate to nearly zero. Several steps have been taken with BitTornado to prevent this from occurring, but apparently some of this throttling is being performed via protocol detection.

I can understand the desire to keep people from abusing network bandwidth with BitTorrent, and that so much BitTorrent traffic carries pirated content. I'd like to note, however, that clients stuck behind firewalls wind up using more bandwidth uploading in order to successfully download than clients with publically accessible server ports, and that a better solution would be to take down the firewall.

If you wish to throttle BitTorrent upstream, that's fine; but throttling the upstream to zero is unfair. If this blocking/throttling becomes widespread, the successor to the current BitTorrent protocol will have an encrypted connection handshake, and you will lose the opportunity to selectively throttle BitTorrent entirely.

(Please forward this message to any entity who is blocking BitTorrent from connecting or uploading. Thank you.)